Ro Khanna Calls Out Both Parties: Immigration, Tech & Free Speech

Ro, how many times have you been on the pod now? Is this number 4 for you—3 or 4?

No, this is my 5th time.

Oh, wait. Sorry. I’m not Ro. Sorry. Over to Ro. Sorry.

We all look the same.

You’re Sri Lankan. He’s Indian. I know the difference.

We all look the same, bro. We all look the same.

It’s like you’re saying that to the Irish guys.

That’s how I won my seat. I just had every Indian American go knock on doors and say, “I’m Ro Khanna.” They all thought the candidate came to every door.

One of my appearances—I think this is number 4—but one of them was on election night, and it was with Donald Trump Jr. I actually ran into him in the green room right before we were doing Squawk Box, and he brought up the pod interview. So there you go, bringing the sides together.

It’s been pretty amazing how successful Indian Americans have become, and a really important topic for us to kick off with—maybe this time, on your 4th appearance—is immigration and H-1Bs. What’s your take, broadly, on what we’re seeing out of the Trump administration in trying to correct the abuse in these systems, and maybe monetize them? Do you think that’s a good strategy for correcting the abuse?

First of all, there’s definitely abuse. Second, it definitely needs to be corrected. The reality is that some of the H-1B visa holders are being paid below-market wages. Some of them are not going to super-talented individuals or to jobs that actually require a lot of skill.

I had a bipartisan bill, actually, that would have reformed it, requiring payment of a prevailing wage and making sure that the categories actually were skilled categories. I don’t love the blanket $100,000 fee. I don’t think that’s the best way to reform it, partly because it puts an unfair burden on startups and may actually hurt with talent. But if you wanted to say, “Look, there’s going to be some prevailing-wage standard and we need reforms,” I’m open to that.

Do you think that the president is moving in the right direction by actually trying to reform the system?

Yeah, I think in terms of reforming the system, he’s moving in the right direction. I don’t agree with the specifics or the way he’s doing it. Like many things, I think sometimes he identifies the right issue and has a solution that I don’t agree with.

But the reality is that it has to be reformed. Anyone in Silicon Valley—you guys know this—it’s been abused. It’s been abused by some of the mass IT outsourcing firms that just have people coming in.

It’s been very difficult to find some of the best young minds to work at our startups, to your point, Ro, because the system has been gamed, and the people who have perfected the application process have won the H-1Bs. I think that’s where these systems go off the rails, because it should be, as you said, the really talented young men and women who move to the United States, supported by an American company trying to do something ambitious.

It should not be because you know how to apply multiple times through multiple shell companies.

Yeah, I agree. And as you know, some of the outsourcing consulting companies—I don’t want to go through all the names, but you know what they are—like Tata Consultancy Services or Cognizant, or others, they’ve gamed the system and get a bulk of those H-1Bs. That needs to stop, and there needs to be actual talent.

But I want to make a point. I was just in China. We had gone on a bipartisan delegation there. One-third of the AI talent is in China, according to a lot of the reports. I want some of those folks to come to the United States so we can stay ahead of AI.

There are legitimate uses of the H-1B program. What we need to do is fix the program so legitimate talent can still come to Silicon Valley and around the nation.

For that cream-skimming, do you think things like national-interest waivers, O-1 visas, EB-1s, and EB-5s are sufficient to accomplish that task, or should that be factored into the H-1B program itself?

I think there needs to be an H-1B program. I don’t think the national-interest waiver and the other programs are enough. Look at how Sundar Pichai came here, or how Satya Nadella came here, and are now leading Google and Microsoft. They studied here and then got an H-1B.

I would also make it so that you don’t stay on an H-1B indefinitely, but move toward a green card. President Trump said on your show in one of your episodes, “I’m going to make sure that we actually move folks quickly to a green card.” That seems like a win-win to me, because you’re then not exploiting an individual. You’re going to pay them the market wage, and they have the flexibility of moving. At the same time, they’re going to stay in the United States instead of going back to China or India.

By the way, if you just limit H-1Bs, a lot of the big companies have overseas headquarters. They’re going to offshore the jobs instead of bringing the jobs here.

Bro, one of the points that Jason has made really well, actually, consistently for years, is that in order to fix the immigration system, I think the first thing you have to do is rebuild trust in the immigration system.

Fair point.

One of the things that the president has done is effectively completely seal the border. I think the statistic he cited is that since January, literally, there have been no illegal immigrants at the southern border. I’m presuming it’s probably similar at the northern border as well. Can you talk about that part of the immigration spectrum and what you think the positives and negatives are of what has happened over the last 9 months?

We need a secure border. We let in too many people under the Biden administration without having proper security. I think the Democrats need to acknowledge that, own up to it, and say that we need to make sure there is a secure border.

I don’t agree with Trump in the way he’s shut down basically all asylum claims and taken it to zero. I don’t agree with that approach. But do I think we needed to do things to secure the border more? I do.

Now the question is, okay, he’s done that. I disagree with how he’s secured it, in that he’s basically made asylum impossible. But will he take some of the goodwill he’s earned in terms of trust and do things that I think can be bipartisan in terms of immigration reform?

One would be industries like agriculture, food production, and construction. For people who are here, who are paying their taxes, and who have been undocumented for a long time, give them a path to legalization. By the way, you want to see food prices come down? That would be one way to do that: give those folks a path to legalization if they’re here, have no criminal record, and have paid their taxes. I’ve seen him sometimes suggest that.

Yeah, he came out and said it. He said, “We have to look at it,” right? He explicitly said it.

I’m a Democrat willing to work with him on that. And the second would be on this green-card thing, which he said explicitly. People are here. If they get a college degree, we’re paying for their education. We want them here.

Six hundred thousand students come here, 300,000 from China. I’m glad, by the way, that the president pushed back against his own base and said that those students should still come, because he got a hard time for saying that. They come here, study at Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, Harvard, or a state college. We’re financing their education in some way, because all these universities get federal subsidies.

Wouldn’t you want them to stay here and create jobs? You’re an investor. Wouldn’t you want them to stay here instead of going back to China and doing it in Shanghai or Beijing?

Yeah, I think this is part of one of the reasons I love having you on the program, Ro. You take a very first-principles, logical, nonpartisan approach to this. You just gave Trump his flowers: “Good job closing the border. Good job identifying that 80% of Americans agree with that.”

I’m curious what’s going on inside the Democratic Party, where a large number of people can’t seem to give Trump any credit for this basic win and then challenge him by saying, “Hey, but this is where we have to go.” How does the Democratic Party look at you and your contemporaries when you’re a moderate, when you try to tone things down, and when you try to take a first-principles, logical approach to these issues?

How are you within your own party? Are you the skunk at the garden party just for saying that Trump actually did something right?

Well, yeah. I’m a progressive Democrat, but I’m a progressive Democrat who tries to call balls and strikes. Like I said, I don’t agree with all the policies he’s used to shut down the border. But it would be foolish to think that we didn’t have a problem at the border, that too many people weren’t coming in, or that we did enough to strengthen the border.

I think that should have been Vice President Harris's answer: what she would have done differently. She could have even said, “I learned we made a mistake. We didn't have the right approach on border security.”

Look, today I tweeted out something about how I agreed with what Trump is doing on the prescription-drug issue: he has a government website that is basically going to sell pharmaceutical drugs at a cheaper price. Now, that's a policy that, if Bernie Sanders or Joe Biden had put forward,—

That's exactly what I was going to say. Bernie Sanders had put this out. Yeah, sorry, go—

Ahead. That we'd all be cheering. I mean, is it as far as I want? No. But it's a step in that direction. So I guess my point is, why not just say, “Okay, that's good”?

I've been very critical of the president's policies in the Middle East, and I've been critical of Biden's policies in the Middle East. But today, Trump put forth the plan that the Arab countries are saying Hamas should take. So I tweeted out that Hamas should accept this, release the hostages, and Israel should withdraw.

That's because I'm rooting for America to succeed in bringing peace to the Middle East. That doesn't mean that I adopt Donald Trump's policy. But I just think we need, as a party, to be honest about where someone is putting forth something that we may agree with and where they're not.

Now, of course, he's doing a lot of things that are unconstitutional, and he puts on antics like having J.D. in a sombrero. He's had Brendan Carr threatening to take Jimmy Kimmel off the air, and threatening universities over their speech. So there's reason for the anger, but I don't think just being anti-Trump is the way back for the Democratic Party.

Can you just diagnose this for us? I think we've entered a phase of politics where it seems like decorum has been lost. Underneath that, is it hatred, or is it incredible competition to accumulate power and win elections? What do you believe is the root cause of why people can't call balls and strikes?

I think it's both. Unfortunately, there has been more extremism and hate in our country. People have really lost the ability to try to see the good in others and to say, “Look, we've got some humility. We may not have all the right answers, and we want to engage.”

I used to say money in politics was our biggest problem. Now I believe hate and extremism are our biggest problem in this country. You're rewarded if you do the most outlandish things because we're in an attention economy. If you pick a fight, people pay attention. So if you're sober, you're going to lose support from your own party, your own base.

But my hope—and I hope this for both parties—is that after the Trump era, and I think even Trump supporters would acknowledge that he's divisive, we can move forward. Look at what he said at Charlie Kirk's funeral, where Erika Kirk gives this beautiful statement of forgiveness and he says, “Well, I can't forgive. I hate my enemies.”

After 8 years of that, I really hope that we don't devolve into both sides just hating each other more and mimicking Trump's style of communication. I hope whoever the Republicans put forward will say, “Look, we want to go forward. It's a new generation. We've had 3 80-year-old presidents in a row in this country. We have a new generation of governors, and we're going to be aspirational and talk about positive things.” I hope the Democrats will do that.

Who do you think those people are on the Democratic side?

I think there are folks like Andy Beshear. There are folks like Wes Moore. Whatever you think of the 3 people who are going to win in November—Mamdani, Abigail Spanberger, and Mikie Sherrill—one thing all 3 of those campaigns have in common is that they don't spend a lot of time talking about Donald Trump.

They're talking about their own vision and their own ideas about what they want to do for their city, their state, the country, and the world. That's what politics should be about. Politics should be about: Here's what my vision is. Here's my plan. Here's where I want to take the nation.

Jason, I don't agree with Ro on Medicare for All. I don't agree with him on where he thinks the tax rate should be. I don't agree with him on having the state play some role in building modern factories in Ohio, in this thing he calls economic patriotism. I'm more libertarian. I'm for deregulation. He doesn't understand how you really grow the economy.

That's what we should be talking about. Instead, everyone's trying to see how they can curse in terms of being authentic, as if that makes you intelligent. It's actually just the expression of emotion without a thought. I'm hoping that we'll have a more serious politics.

You had a really great moment on a podcast I heard you on. I can't remember which one, but you were saying, “I wonder if comedy is the precursor now. Being funny, being witty on programs is like the precursor to running for president.”

But let's talk about how to win the technology industry back on the Democratic side. You had essentially the entire industry. You had a monopoly. Let's call it what it is: 9 out of 10, 95 out of 100 Democrats.

We even had Chamath.

You had Chamath. You had Mark Pincus. Listen, even inside the administration: Bessent, Lutnick, Trump himself. I didn't know—

They were all Democrats. Yeah, all previous Democrats, including Trump himself.

So, is there a road back? If we were to do a little postmortem on how the tech industry was abandoned and vilified, I know for me, as a moderate, basically up until this time, I've voted Democrat two out of three times. Now it's like 60/40-ish. The bashing of billionaires and the demonization of entrepreneurs must have been uncomfortable for you to watch.

Obviously, you see the entire digerati at the White House having dinner. You must be thinking to yourself, “My God, Biden could have done that at any time. He could have summoned everybody and said, ‘Hey, come, let's talk about your issues.’” But instead, the industry was vilified.

I don't want to spend too much time on it, but what's your diagnosis of how that happened? And then how does the Democratic Party win back technology leaders and billionaires?

I do joke that I think the tech industry has become the new aristocracy. I look at the White House: There they are—Sundar Pichai, Tim Cook, and Satya Nadella, and all the group. Then the King of England, King Charles. There they are, or something. So it's a group that obviously has a lot of stature and respect.

I guess here was my point to the Biden administration, which they either didn't agree with or ignored. I said, “You're making a mistake if you think getting Silicon Valley folks on your side is about the money,” because they would always say, “Oh, Biden's going to raise all this money. We don't need the Valley's money.”

I said, “Yeah, you're going to raise all the money.” And they did. They raised tons of money. Harris raised tons of money. I said, “That's not what it's about. It's about culture.”

I said, “There are a lot of young people in America who admire these entrepreneurs, who listen to All-In, who want to build wealth, who want to build the next generation of wealth. By the way, on crypto, why are there so many young Black and Latino folks who care about crypto? Because, frankly, it's often the closest they're going to get to a friends-and-family round in technology. We've got to expand economic opportunity so they have more options.”

There are a lot of people who want to have a part of the digital economy, who look up to entrepreneurs and innovators. You basically let Trump, this 1980s real-estate guy who was kind of passé, who was wondering whether we were going to get more reruns of The Apprentice and another act in politics, be the cool guy hanging out with all these tech folks, saying, “No, I'm the future.”

I said, “That's the worst mistake our party has made, because we've got to be the party of the future. We've got to be the party of entrepreneurship and innovation.” And you can be like me, a guy who says, “We should tax the—”

I'll just tell you one quick story. I think it's not that.

I think it's something more basic. When we were at that dinner—

Yeah.

He asked everybody, “What is the biggest issue that you're dealing with?” He goes around the table and asks a very basic and open-ended question.

I can say this because I think it was pretty clear what happened afterward, but one of the things that was mentioned was just the overwhelming pressure that the Europeans were putting on Google. I don't know if you remember this. The day after, beyond making some calls, what he did was put a pretty meaningful pressure campaign in place that allowed the release valve to get released, so that Google had less pressure from the European regulators and less onerous terms.

I think that's what it is, because when you sit with him, he's not selling an agenda. He mostly just asks you what's going on, and then he says, “What can I do?” I think that is a unique feature that many politicians have lost.

You said an important thing that I just want to double-click on because I would love your perspective on this. I do believe that President Trump views the world through the lens of economic patriotism. Alex Karp at an All-In Summit referred to it in the spirit of Chinese tai chi: It’s internal stability; it’s how you make sure that you have the resources so that you have effectively infinite optionality abroad.

That makes sense to me. So I’m just curious: What is the opposite of the economic patriotism that Trump offers that you’ve seen expressed in other countries? The Chinese, I think it’s very fair to say, had their own view of economic patriotism. Why is the opposite of that a better model?

Economic patriotism has been my platform. That’s why Ben Sasse says, “Watch out for this kind of guy.” I’ve been talking about and writing about economic patriotism for years. Let me talk about why it’s different from where Trump is.

I think he listens, but he’s not listening enough to people who are saying, “The tariff policy is not going to get us to economic development.” He’s not listening enough, in my view, to people who are saying that you can’t just take a sledgehammer to universities and research; that’s not going to help build the economy of this country. He’s not listening enough to people who are saying, “Don’t just have all this vetting for international students, and don’t insult immigrants coming to the United States. We do need immigrants.”

Now, I agree that he gave some of those answers in All-In, but overall, there hasn’t been the same understanding and case made for the role of immigrants in the community. What I believe is that we need a Marshall Plan for America, and I wish that we had a White House Economic Council. I did this bill with Marco Rubio that actually looks at Youngstown, Warren, Ohio, and Milwaukee, and says that, not only should we have advanced manufacturing, but we should put tech jobs there. AI is there. Health care is there.

Let’s have an economic renaissance in this country and bring the country together. To me, we should be arguing in both parties about how we do that. I have a different view on some of the policies I’ve articulated, but that should be the goal.

If you look at promoting that economic exceptionalism, there are a bunch of categories where I think the policy has diverged pretty meaningfully. Paradoxically, the most obvious example is around AI, where we’ve gone from a much more regimented, stage-gated way of seeing the world and, under President Trump and our bestie David Sacks, we’ve gone into a much more open mandate that acknowledges we’re in a very tough competition with an extremely talented Chinese competitor.

What’s your view on some of these groundbreaking areas of tech? How do we think about protection versus how do we think about proliferation?

That’s a big question. First, we start by saying I believe AI is going to do more good than bad in the world. I know that’s a simple statement, but there are many people who may not agree with that. The advances it can make in human disease and the diagnosis of human disease, in education curriculum for young people, and in production are significant.

One of the places we went to in Beijing was Xiaomi, the factory that makes these phones, and I was stunned. They have these machines that are basically putting together the phone. I mean, it’s a model of the iPhone.

To your point, we had Joseph Tsai, who is the chairman of Alibaba, at the summit. The most incredible thing that Tsai said is that, by government edict, essentially, they’ve mandated that 95% of all government institutions need to be running on AI by 2030. You and I both know that in any Western country, if such an edict or something happened, you’d kind of just say, “Let’s discount this essentially to zero. Maybe it’s PR fluff.”

But you know, I don't know, Jason, what you thought, but I was sitting there thinking the only country that can probably pull this off is the Chinese because if

In the UAE, top down, you can mandate it.

So, to your point, Ro, we’re going to have an incredibly formidable competitor. In some ways, the infighting and the rancor just needs to get dialed down; otherwise, we’re going to miss the conditions on the field.

You’re on the verge of a shutdown. Can you walk us through the inside baseball of what’s happened over the last few days, where we are, what the sticking point is, what you think the odds are that this thing will get resolved, and what happens if there’s a shutdown? Can you just walk us through all of that?

Just 2 points on AI, though. We do need to think about job displacement and what we can do as a country. I believe the federal government has to step in, for young people in particular, to say, “Look, you can work for a few years if you can’t find a private-sector job, helping with child care, elder care, your communities, health care, and government services.” Maybe we make AI so that the DMV works better, and people start to think that government services actually are effective.

I think there has to be a lot of thought put into the displacement and being ahead of the curve. The only thing I’d say about China is, while they’re formidable, the one statistic that made me think we’ve got a lot of things right here that they haven’t is 20% youth unemployment in China. That’s because there are all these college graduates; they don’t want to work on a factory line. I tease Lutnick about screws on the iPhone or something. A lot of college graduates didn’t want to do that in China, and at the same time, not everyone is going to be making EVs.

In our country, you do a lot of what the Chinese would say are silly things, like making dating apps, comedy apps, and sports apps, and doing a lot of other things. They don’t have that, and I think that gives us a huge advantage in terms of creativity and culture if we can get the basics right.

Now, the government shutdown—the first fight is over something that I’m biased about, but I fundamentally believe is a basic principle: If Congress passes something, the president has to spend what Congress passes. It’s not discretionary. You know, Fetterman said, “Elections matter.” Well, elections to Congress matter, too, and you can’t—

You may just want to explain to the audience, because I’m not sure all of us are up to speed on exactly the thing that’s happening.

Trump has this view that, okay, spending is too high; these agencies are wasting money. “I’m going to come in, and I’m going to make certain decisions about cutting spending that Congress may have appropriated.” He did this on foreign aid. He’s done it on some of the things with the Department of Education. We can go through other programs.

I got into an argument with Elon when he was there. I originally said, “Look, I’m open to working with DOGE if there are reasonable things that we can save, but you have to do it through a process.” They have a view. Their view is, “Well, Congress is never going to do this, so we’re just going to go there and do it.” And that’s not the way the Constitution works.

You can’t expect Democrats to say, “Okay, we’re going to give you our votes for a budget if it’s all discretionary and Trump can do whatever he wants anyway with the budget.” That’s the basic fault line.

The second argument is over health care. This is just factual: If the tax credits expire on the exchange, people who are paying about $7,000 on the exchange would go up to about $21,000. You’d basically be kicking off a ton of people from the exchanges. Democrats just can’t do that.

Now, you can say, “Well, you lost the election.” Then I have no problem getting rid of the filibuster, and the Republicans have the votes in the Senate and the House and President Trump, and they can pass the budget. But my hope is that they will realize that these tax credits are worth saving, that they’re not going to want people kicked off health care, and they’re not going to want these premiums going up high. Then that will be the deal.

Ro, the argument on the other side—

—says that the tax credits and the health care subsidies will largely go to folks who are here illegally.

First of all, it’s a very small portion of people that we’re talking about. So 90% is not anything to do with those who are undocumented. That’s just the math, right? We can argue about the 10%.

But we have in this country something called emergency Medicaid. What does that mean? If you’re undocumented and you show up at the hospital, we will take care of you. I believe that is correct. I don’t think that if you’re undocumented and you show up to a hospital, you should be denied care.

Well, who pays for that? We have an emergency Medicaid program. And I guess if you mean that when you fund Medicaid, when you fund the Affordable Care Act, you’re saying you’re funding some of it for undocumented people who are showing up in emergency situations, then, yeah, you’re funding that. But my view is that, let’s be honest, that’s not where the big money and the budgets are. You’re talking about a small group of folks.

You can argue the cultural point about it, but don’t make that about the numbers.

So, for the average person watching or listening, what technically happens if there’s a shutdown? What happens to their everyday lives?

Well, first of all, it’s bad for some of the public servants, right? Will the Capitol Police and police officers get paid? Will the military get paid? If they have a family member who is in government service, will they get paid? Americans and their family members may care about that, or you’re going to have people without pay.

Second, there will be some services that start getting cut, right? If you’re flying on a plane, you may not notice it for a few days, but after a few weeks, you’re saying, “Oh, there are fewer flights because we don’t have enough people showing up or staffing the airports,” and some of the parks may shut down. Things that involve the government that aren’t national security or urgent are going to get affected.

Let’s talk a little bit about the censorship issue. This has come up multiple times. It’s a culture issue for sure, but why are both sides so obsessed with this? And how do we get this resolved between both sides?

There’s another both-sides issue, which is political speech that’s violent: “Fight like hell,” “Trump is Hitler.” The stuff that I don’t hear you saying, but that we do.

Stephen Miller is a fascist.

Stephen Miller said it the other day. Yeah, tweeted it out.

He’s gone full Trump in terms of the trolling. I wouldn’t call it full Trump. I would just say it was really trolling each other.

Yeah. There’s a way to argue. I’ve gone back and forth with Stephen Miller, and we have exchanges. I’ve gone back and forth with Vice President Vance. Sometimes I think some of it is inane, but the point is, it’s within bounds. He’s not saying, “Deport Ro,” and I’m not using the words of Hitler or other things in talking about him.

You can have spirited debate in a way that isn’t Pollyannish, is tough, but respects certain norms—that the other person is a person of intelligence whose views you disagree with.

Is there no leadership, though, Ro? When you’re in D.C., do people come together and say, “You know what? The people who have the most to lose here are us, so it’s in our best interest, in terms of self-preservation, for all of us to just speak in a more kind, civil way to each other”?

Because there are a large number of mentally ill people out there. I believe that's at the core of this: mentally ill people hear different things when you say “fight like hell” or “this person's Hitler,” et cetera, and they may act on it.

Can I say something? I think this is an important point, but I want to push back on that. It's too simple to sweep it under the rug as a mental illness issue. When you have somebody get assassinated where the bullet says, “Hey, fascist! Catch!” and then less than 10 or 12 days later, you have one of, if not the most visible, leaders of the Democratic Party, in all caps, screaming on X, “Stephen Miller is a fascist,” I think that's just irresponsible.

I think we can all admit that that is irresponsible. What happens is, as Ro said, the extremes have been amplified in an attention economy, but I think it's too simple to say that they have something that can just be swept under the rug. I think this is a chronic issue, and you can both-sides it.

When Trump said, “Go fight like hell,” and they went and beat police officers at the Capitol, I don't know if you were there, Ro, and what that was like, but I was—

You were there, and it was pretty scary. That thing could have gotten out of hand. The Oath Keepers and Antifa are both radical organizations that will murder people and beat police. They're very disturbed individuals in both of these groups.

So I think you can both-sides this, and every time we see one of these crazy, extreme people, it's really the same profile. They're white men who are disconnected from reality. I don't know how a sane person drives into a church, kills people, and lights it on fire, like we saw the other day.

No, Jason, I understand. But I'm saying there's a broad group of people committing these actions who aren't just deranged. They're being incited. They're being programmed. They're being pulled into behaving in ways that, if they had other things—other attachments—they may not necessarily have done this.

I would agree with that. If there were religion and family, and they weren't shut-ins playing video games, I agree.

Let me hear you, bro.

No, no, it's good. I feel like I'm in a therapy session with old married couples.

Poker table. This is the whole point of the podcast: at the poker table. Here you are at the table. Go ahead. Tell us your—

Here's my view. Obviously, that kind of extreme rhetoric is leading to cases of political violence, but it's more than that, right? It's not just the Charlie Kirk assassination, January 6, or the attack on Pelosi's home. It's also making us hate each other as Americans.

It's making us incapable of coming together to say, “You know what? I agree with Donald Trump selling pharmaceutical drugs at a cheap price because that's the direction Bernie Sanders would go.” We can't do that. Why? Because we've created such anger, extremism, and tribalism in our politics.

The reality is, right now, you're rewarded for it. If you grab attention and show that you've got vengeance on the other side, your poll numbers go up within your own base. You get more contributions. We just need to speak plainly about some of the incentives.

If the election was in November of 2025—the next presidential election—I think both sides would end up nominating the side that's going to take it to the other one: “Own the libs” from the Republicans, and “fight fire with fire” with everything and “own the MAGA folks” from the Democrats.

I am hoping—I don't know if that's true—I'm hoping that people will see that this is a spiral downward, that fighting fire with fire leaves ashes for everyone. That's what Emanuel Cleaver says. We've got to find a different way of moving forward.

By the way, even people who agree with Trump on policies—there have been a lot of presidents in our country's history: FDR, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Obama. Not all of them were divisive. There was one guy who did that, and my view is, first of all, American politics disdains a copycat. You're probably not going to be successful just mimicking him.

Secondly, why wouldn't you want this country to return to aspirational, inspirational politics, whether your choice is right? I think people are going to get burned out on it.

The other 2 issues I wanted to hear from you on are the censorship one and then the lawfare one. It was pretty clear that 6 or 7 cases brought against Trump while the Biden administration was in were reaching, right? Maybe it would be fair to say they were lawfare-esque.

Now you're having the exact same thing Trump is doing with Comey, where he's firing the U.S. attorney in that district and putting a new one in. I'm wondering how you think about the censorship wars going back and forth and then the lawfare ones, because we, as moderates—and I think moderates are the ones who are swinging these elections right now—

We're getting very tired of it.

I am exhausted with the fact that neither side will stand down on censorship or on the lawfare. What are your thoughts?

Well, on censorship, I have a particularly strong record. When people say, “What makes you a different kind of Democrat?” I say, “Free speech.”

All these people who got outraged when Jimmy Kimmel was pulled down were often silent when Twitter was censoring the New York Post over the Hunter Biden laptop stories. As you may remember, my email leaked, where I said, “No, you shouldn't be pulling down that story, and you shouldn't be having the New York Post take that down.”

Then I got criticized from my own side, even though I'm one of the strongest defenders of trans rights. You may have disagreements over where my stance is because I said that the comedian who was arrested at Heathrow Airport for a transphobic post should not be arrested for that. I got criticized from the left.

So my point is, when I speak out and say, “Okay, Jimmy Kimmel shouldn't be pulled down, and we shouldn't be canceling speech or going after left-wing groups,” there's at least some credibility because I'm willing to say, “Look, our side is engaged in that kind of censorship as well.” It's wrong when either side does it.

I think our side would have a lot more credibility in going after Trump, even if they didn't do it back then, if we just acknowledged that we've got this speech problem on our side. It's easy to be for free speech when it's speech you like, like Kimmel. It's hard to be for free speech. The test is not whether you'll stand up for it when you like it; it's whether you'll stand up for it when you don't like it. And that's—

Okay. Because this is—you know, I didn't like it when they did it to Trump. There did seem to be some situations where he was provocative or did some things that, on the margins, could have gotten you a ticket, let's say.

But then you have these big judgments against him that I don't think would have been brought if he wasn't running for president again, or if they didn't want him to run for president again.

And now we have the same thing happening with Comey, and they're literally picking the U.S. attorneys and firing them and putting people in who've never actually even been in front of a grand jury just to get this revenge. It's a pretty dark time, I think, on the law front. What do you think?

Yeah, look, I don't want to relitigate Trump's actions. I do think he did certain things, like January 6 and others, that were blatantly illegal and unconstitutional. But I will say this: whoever is going forward for the parties should make a firm commitment that they're going to follow the law and not engage in vengeance or retribution. And it's sad to me that we've gotten to this state.

I understand Trump feels like, okay, he won a second term. He was spared from assassination. He had everyone against him, and he's going to get the people who he feels wronged him. But it's a horrible thing for the country, and we've got to make it clear that we're going to move past this chapter—not that now Democrats are going to come in and go after everyone on their side. I mean, then we're no different from any other country.

Jumping off tangentially from lawfare, let's talk about crime for a second. You describe yourself as a progressive Democrat. One of the themes around that is social justice reform, and you're seeing some of the implications of that: the abuse of no-bail policies, the abuses by DAs who are letting teen repeat offenders out on the street.

You're now seeing how that manifests in crime, right? Everything from this young woman from Ukraine who was brutally murdered to this young woman, the 22-year-old, who was killed as part of a home invasion. Her father gave this gripping testimony a few days ago. Where are the Democrats on this idea of keeping the streets safe and maintaining law and order through the lens of the social justice reforms you believe in as a progressive?

One of the things I say is that my district—and I don't say this to brag; I just say this to make a point—is actually one of the safest in America. When you look at Fremont, Cupertino, Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, and San Jose, they're all in the top 25 safest cities.

I say that's correlated with the fact that we have 5 trillion-dollar companies: Apple, Google, Nvidia, Tesla, and Broadcom. You wouldn't have the economic prosperity of Silicon Valley if you didn't have the safety of Silicon Valley, because you wouldn't have executives living there, you wouldn't have families living there, and you wouldn't have people wanting to participate in the economy. Safety is essential if you believe in creating economic opportunity and economic mobility.

I think that there is a group of pragmatic mayors now: Daniel Lurie, I would say, in San Francisco; Matt Mahan in San Jose; and Raj Salwan in Fremont, who recognize that the pendulum had swung too far. I supported that ballot initiative that was on the ballot last election that said, if you're committing multiple crimes of smashing into Walgreens, then you're going to be charged. You can't just say, "Okay, yeah, you can keep smashing into Walgreens, taking under $1,000, and it's okay."

I don't view that as being not progressive. I thought the whole point of progressives is that you believe in the rule of law. Now, if you say you shouldn't lock someone up for the rest of their life, or that mandatory minimums are wrong, fine. But that doesn't mean you excuse behavior that is—

How does a 14-time felon never end up being held accountable, then end up on the streets and just savagely murder somebody? It's totally unacceptable. I mean—

It's totally unacceptable.

Totally unacceptable.

It happened with that Ukrainian girl. I don't remember all the details, but I think it happened with that Ukrainian girl. It happened with this Indian American who was beheaded in Texas, where the person had all these arrests.

The interesting thing is, I spoke out about those, and I didn't get that much pushback from a liberal base. So what I don't understand is where the pressure is coming from in just saying, look, we've got to use common sense in this country.

Now, I don't think the answer is to put federal troops in, like Trump is. But what the Democrats should realize, in my view, is this: Why is the country letting him do that, which I don't think is constitutional or the right solution? Because they're so frustrated with what's going on, and just citing statistics, going out there and saying, "Well, the statistics are down"—

Yeah. This doesn't match people's reality. People are smart, and I think this is a really stupid strategy by the Democrats.

If Trump says, "I'm going to send in the National Guard because you guys haven't done the job," the obvious kung fu move is to redirect that energy and say, "Yes, here are the 5 places—these are hot spots where we need those troops. If you can put these troops on these 5 corners, on Turk Street, on 6th Street, that's where we need them. How long can we get them for before you move them to the next hot spots?"

That would totally take away what is an obvious play by the Republican Party to make the Democrats fall for the trap of, "We're pro-crime, we don't care about people's safety," which, by the way, is just so dumb.

It's so dumb. Why are Democrats in these specific cities—Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco—so dumb?

Well, these are hard cities to govern. I mean, it's not—

Dumb. They're not hard. I'm always honest: I disagree with you on the National Guard coming there, but I do agree—

I disagree—I agree with you, by the way, that it's not constitutional. But in a situation where people are suffering day in and day out, what happened in Washington, D.C., when they brought in the National Guard, we should have, Jason. I think everybody said, "I love—"

Jason, I think this comes down to leadership. When you look at these big cities, there are examples of when they have been governed well, and it takes a point of view and the balls to just say, "This is how it's going to be." The last best example of this is Mike Bloomberg in New York. Yes.

I remember the first thing Mike did was he said, "Soda out." The second thing he did: smoking, done.

It completely changed the way the world works. If you guys remember, you used to go to bars everywhere.

Yeah.

And you would smoke incessantly, and even if you didn't smoke, you were subject to all this disgusting secondhand smoke.

But when Mike did that one thing, it cascaded throughout the world.

It takes leadership. Bratton did CompStat under Giuliani. But anyway, Ro, explain to us what the right solution here is.

Well, I think Bloomberg had a good record. Look at what Matt Mahan and Daniel Lurie are doing closer to home. They're saying, "Look, we need more police. We need to understand that if people have mental health issues and they're not getting off the street again and again and again, you can go to a court and say that they need treatment."

We need to be funding more temporary housing, not just permanent housing, because, yeah, we want permanent housing long-term, but that doesn't mean in the meantime we do nothing. I think they're pragmatic. They've acknowledged it's a problem, and they're working at it.

What I don't think works is just denying people's feelings, because when I was growing up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, we used to leave our house doors unlocked. That's the lived memory of a lot of people.

The problem with denying it is that if you embrace Trump's whole thing—that life used to be simpler in the 1960s, you could leave your doors unlocked, you had a good job, you worked in a manufacturing plant, and you supported your family—you don't want to move backward, because there's a lot of social progress we've made. There's a lot of great parts to our diversity and people from around the planet being here. We've got to make sure that everyone buys into the future, and safety is first in that.

Stay on this local theme for a second. Tell us about Mamdani. What is he? You know, it's—

It's $10 billion for bodegas. It's billions of dollars for this, it's billions of dollars for that. I think I heard recently he wants to charge a 2% tax on people above a certain salary. He wants to charge any company that does business in New York City an extra tax. What? What is—

Yeah. And how does he come out of nowhere and just run the table on the establishment?

Well, I'll tell you why. I've campaigned for 3 candidates in the November elections: Abigail Spanberger, who's going to win in Virginia; Mikie Sherrill; and I've supported Mamdani because of the moment he's had.

I think Mamdani's success was based on 2 things. 1, the recognition that New York City was unaffordable and just speaking about that unaffordability. There are certain things which are pretty practical, like most people don't pay for the buses anyway. They're on the buses without paying the ticket, and if he wants to make the buses free, that's a reasonable policy.

But he was basically saying, look, you can't afford to live in New York.

And none of the other candidates really spoke about that. They were speaking about crime and public safety, and they weren't talking about the economy. The other thing is—and I have differences with him on the Middle East. I'm for a two-state solution. I've condemned “globalize the intifada,” but he was saying, “Look, there are too many people being killed in Gaza, and Netanyahu's policies are wrong.” And that resonated with people in New York City.

So the challenge for our party is: How do we recognize the—

Is he the candidate of giveaways, or is he the candidate of where we realistically need to be in order to have stability?

I think he's a candidate who is sounding the five-alarm fire on affordability and the loss of the American dream. How he governs is, I think, going to be a challenge, and I hope that he's a very talented guy. I hope he says, “Okay, look, I'm going to sit down, as I am with business leaders and other leaders, and say, ‘Help me achieve my goals.’”

I want to have a rent freeze on the apartments that are controlled by New York, but I also want to make sure we're doubling housing construction and building new housing. How do we do that? I want to make sure that if I am increasing taxes, there's not capital flight from New York City. What happens if, after winning, he's a complete, utter disaster in how he runs that city? What does that do to the Democratic Party?

I don't think he will be, but that would hurt us, right? I don't think he can have a record that's a failure. I think, in fact, a lot of the progressives are invested in him succeeding and making sure that he has a pragmatic success record. But look, I think people who just want to say, “Well, we should just reject Mamdani,” aren't understanding the amount of people that he speaks for in the Democratic Party who feel like we need to tackle economic inequality. He speaks to young people.

He's clearly hit a note on those issues. Then the question is, can he execute? I remember when Dinkins came into office. That was when we bottomed out in New York. I was a teenager. Then we got Giuliani and Bloomberg back to back, and we cleaned up the city. I get Dinkins vibes if he doesn't actually take on the safety issue in addition to these other issues.

Man, Ro, as we wrap, just one last question: There's a movement afoot to ban stock trading by people in Congress, and you've been supportive of that. I think we saw something recently that said—I don't even know if you know this—but somebody who manages your money has traded 30,000 times, or something, some number. Do you want to just address what that is and where you stand on banning stock trading, and whether it's simpler to move everybody to ETFs and just call it a day?

I am totally for a stock-trading ban. I've led on that. I don't trade stocks. My wife's money was inherited in trusts that I have no say over and no control over, and it's in a trust. The TRUST in Congress Act would require every person, actually, to be in a trust, and that eliminates conflict. So I've been very consistent about it, and I've been one of the leaders on a ban on stocks.

So what do you got? What tip? Any tips for us?

No, but did you know that somebody related to you is trading 30,000 times a year?

I have no idea. It's like a Citadel inside of Ro Khanna. I don't know if you know this, but it's—

It has nothing to do with me, right? It's not my money. I mean, I have no involvement in it.

It's tiny amounts, too. That's really interesting. Small trades, lots of small trades. Anyway, whoever's working for you seems to be doing a good job for you.

No, not for me.

Working for the family. Listen, Ro Khanna—voice of reason, moderate, honest, and I'm just really excited for you to run for president. Bro, last question—actually, last question. There's still a pretty open field for California governor. Have you thought about it, and if not, why not?

No. A lot of it is that I think you've got to really have spent some time in Sacramento to deal with those issues. A lot of my issues have been: How do we build economic prosperity in parts of the country that have been left out? How do we deal with our competitiveness with China and other nations? I'm on the China Select Committee. I'm on the House Armed Services Committee. I've been focused on economic patriotism.

I don't think you just run for a title. The type of person who should run is one who's going to focus on getting our utility costs down in California, who's going to focus on making our streets safer, who's going to focus on building more housing and being a YIMBY and saying that we need to do these things. I think there will be good candidates emerging with those skills in California.

Ro, thank you.

Thank you. Thanks, Jason. Great to have you.

Thank you, sir.